Dave Hutchinson - Europe in Autumn

“I hope those girls had very good bona fides,” Rudi said.

Seth shouldered his bag. “Let’s find out.”

IT TOOK THEM almost three hours to reach the end of the track. It opened out onto a rutted, damaged B-road. A hundred yards or so further down, a transparent plastic bus shelter almost covered in sprayed graffiti stood all alone by the side of the road. They stood in the shelter, shaking rain from their clothes and looking about them.

“How did you get in touch with them?” Rudi wanted to know.

“I didn’t. They contacted me.” Off in the distance through the rain, Seth could see the approaching headlights of a vehicle.

“They contacted you.”

“While I was in Edinburgh doing research for Roger Curtis. They wanted to know what I was up to.” Seth picked up his bag. “I was impressed; I was being pretty careful.”

“And on that basis you just handed over a very large amount of money to two strangers, without any evidence of their claims.”

“Of course not,” said Seth. The vehicle was now close enough to be identified as a bus, bouncing and bumping along the appalling road. “I asked for a demonstration and they gave me a freebie. This is how I came back across the border.” The bus pulled to a stop at the shelter, its illuminated destination sign reading ‘HAWICK.’ “Shall we?”

AT DAWN, THE Revisionists rocketed Building 2.

They used RPGs and at least one aged TOW wire-guided anti-tank missile, but they must have bought the munitions at one of the anarchic car-boot sales on the outskirts of the city because most of them failed to detonate. The few that did caused little damage, and fire-suppression teams were able to cope.

Still, it was a message that Xavier and his cohorts had not yet given up. They’d been quiet for almost a month until this morning, and some of the Kapitan’s advisers had begun to murmur that perhaps the opposition had seen the error of its ways. The Kapitan, who had found Xavier under a pile of rubbish behind the Anhalter station and raised him like a member of his own family, had known better.

Kapitan Todt rarely slept these days, anyway, so the attack wasn’t a colossal surprise. He spent his nights moving from window to window, watching Building 4 through image-amplifying binoculars, and he’d caught the signs of movement, the figures flitting about in rooms across the Parade Ground, that presaged some kind of action. Xavier must want him to think he was getting sloppy. By the time the first rocket propelled grenade was fired, he had already brought the Grandsons – who had been on a state of red alert for over a year now anyway – to full readiness and there were no casualties and only minimal damage.

In the fitful grey light of morning, once he had satisfied himself that the attack wasn’t a feint or the opening move of a full-scale assault, the Kapitan did a quick tour of the damaged areas, mostly in the centre of the building between the eighth and fifteenth floors. Broken windows. Rubble. Some fire and smoke damage. Emergency teams were already cleaning up the mess. The Kapitan nodded appreciatively, offered some quiet words of thanks and support, all smiles and calm.

Inwardly, he was furious.

Later, when his intelligence chief answered the summons to his office, the Kapitan closed the door behind them and then grabbed the man by the front of his shirt and threw him across the room.

“Intelligence failure!” he shouted. “People could have been killed! For an intelligence failure!”

The intelligence chief, whose name was Hansi, picked himself up off the floor and wiped blood from a cut on his face. “None of our sources reported anything like this, Kapitan,” he said.

“I should dangle you out of this window by your cock and let Xavier and his friends take pot-shots at you,” the Kapitan snarled. The last intelligence failure had missed the Revisionists’ hiring of an expert sniper from Bremen. Eight people had died before an assassination squad broke into Building 1 and killed him. The Kapitan had made Hansi lead the squad himself, and had let him live when his mission was successful. Kapitan Todt did not feel quite as well-disposed towards Hansi today.

“I give you money,” he yelled. “I give you resources. And in return for that I expect to hear when they go out on a shopping spree and buy missiles!”

“Xavier himself went to buy them, Kapitan,” the man blustered. “On his own. He didn’t hand out the weapons until moments before the attack.”

“Oh, you know all about this now , do you?”

Hansi took half a step backward. “It’s… it’s the only way it could have happened, Kapitan.”

“And nobody noticed he was missing ? Your spies ? Your little sneaks on the other side of the Parade Ground?”

Hansi opened his mouth. Closed it again.

“Every time you come to me for money, you promise me that Xavier will not be able to take a shit without one of your rats reporting about it to you. And now apparently he can leave the Municipality at will and come back with a van stuffed with high explosives and nobody notices.” The Kapitan took a step towards Hansi and Hansi took another step back. “Find out how this happened, Hansi,” he said. “Find out where he got the rockets from, and then fucking get me some!”

After Hansi had left, the Kapitan’s second-in-command, Leutnant Brandt, emerged from one of the other rooms and said, “Dangerous man.”

“Incompetent man,” the Kapitan said.

“You should get rid of him, before he goes across the Parade Ground.”

Kapitan Todt snorted. “Xavier’s welcome to him. It would probably work out in our favour.” He looked out of the window – painted with one-way reflective paint ever since the sniper incident – and after a few moments he said, “You think he’s getting ready to defect?”

“That sort are only ever in the fight for the rewards,” said Brandt. “As soon as they start drying up they’re off looking for someone else to leech onto.”

“Well I’m not going to keep hurling resources at him if he gets things this badly wrong,” the Kapitan said mildly. “I’d have to be an idiot to do that.” He sighed. “He knows where too many bodies are buried to take the chance. Bury him with them.”

“Yes, Kapitan.”

“And Brandt?”

“Yes, Kapitan?”

“I’m constantly reviewing everybody’s loyalties.”

Brandt seemed to falter momentarily, searching for an answer. Finally he said “Yes, Kapitan.”

BEFORE BRANDT THERE had been Mundt, and before Mundt there had been Falkenberg, and before Falkenberg there had been Meyer, and before Meyer there had been Xavier.

Xavier. Xavier X, who encouraged people to call him ‘Twenty’ because of his initials and who wore under his shirt a necklace of ears reputedly cut from the heads of shopkeepers and businesspeople who had been shortsighted enough not to join in with his protection rackets.

Kapitan Todt had found the boy hiding from the Anhalter Bahnhof polizei one rainy night in March, ten years ago. The Grandsons – they had still not quite geared up to make the jump from football hooliganry and medium-level racism to running their own country – had attacked another gang of supporters in the station concourse. The private security police had broken the fight up and everyone had scattered, the Kapitan and his predecessor, Kolonel Aldo, finding themselves in a little-visited area of dumpsters and piles of refuse bags behind some of the station’s fast food franchises.

As they crouched, panting quietly, waiting to see whether anyone had followed them, Aldo heard something moving under a nearby pile of bags. The two young men threw the bags aside, and found a filthy boy crouching under them, the neck of a broken bottle clutched in one hand and a brand new Sony microtainment centre, still in its box and somehow smuggled out through the Sony franchise centre’s security procedures, at his side. What struck the Kapitan, even then, was that there was no fear at all in the boy’s eyes. He would have tried to kill them both if he had to.